* Satellite data suggests flew north towards Kazakhstan or
south over Indian Ocean

* 227 passengers and 12 crew aboard lost flight

By Anshuman Daga and Siva Govindasamy

KUALA LUMPUR, March 15 (Reuters) - A missing Malaysian
jetliner was likely steered deliberately to a course that could
have taken it anywhere from central Asia to the southern Indian
Ocean, Malaysia's prime minister said on Saturday (Shenzhen: 002291.SZ - news) , in a dramatic
revelation that intensified scrutiny of the 239 crew and
passengers.

Minutes after Malaysian leader Najib Razak outlined
investigators' latest findings about flight MH370 at a news
conference, police began searching the house of the aircraft's
53-year-old captain for any evidence that he could have been
involved in foul play.

Najib, giving his first statement at a news conference since
the day that the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER
vanished from radar screens a week ago, confirmed reports that
investigators believe somebody cut off the plane's
communications and steered it west, far from its scheduled route
to Beijing.

"In view of this latest development the Malaysian
authorities have refocused their investigation into the crew and
passengers on board," he said.

"Despite media reports the plane was hijacked, I wish to be
very clear, we are still investigating all possibilities as to
what caused MH370 to deviate."

Search operations by navies and aircraft from more than a
dozen nations were immediately called off in the Gulf of
Thailand and the South China Sea to the east of Malaysia, where
the plane dropped off civilian air traffic control screens at
1:22 a.m. last Saturday (1722 GMT on Friday).

Najib said new data showed the last communication between
the missing plane and satellites at 8:11 a.m. (0011 GMT), almost
seven hours after it turned back and crossed the Malay
peninsula.

The data did not show whether the plane was still flying or
its location at that time, presenting searchers with a daunting
array of possible last locations. Seven hours more flying time
would likely have taken it to the limit of its fuel load.

Najib said the plane's final communication with satellites
placed it somewhere in one of two corridors: a northern corridor
stretching from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan
and Turkmenistan, or a southern corridor stretching from
Indonesia to the vast southern Indian Ocean.

"Clearly, the search for MH370 has entered a new phase,"
said Najib, whose government has come under criticism for its
slow release of information surrounding what is one of the most
baffling mysteries in aviation history.

About two-thirds of the passengers on board the flight were
Chinese, and Beijing has been showing increasing impatience with
the speed and co-ordination of the Malaysian search effort.

On Saturday, China said it had demanded that Malaysia keep
providing more thorough and accurate information, and added that
it was sending a technical team to Malaysia to help with the
investigation.

China's Xinhua state news agency said in a commentary that
Najib's disclosure of the new details was "painfully belated".

"And due to the absence - or at least lack - of timely
authoritative information, massive efforts have been squandered,
and numerous rumours have been spawned, repeatedly racking the
nerves of the awaiting families," it said.

FOUL PLAY

The fate of flight MH370 has been shrouded in mystery since
it disappeared off Malaysia's east coast less than an hour into
its March 8 scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

But investigators have increasingly discounted the
possibility of an accident due to the deliberate way it was
diverted and had its communications switched off.

Investigative sources told Reuters on Friday they believed
the plane was following a commonly used navigational route when
it was last spotted early on Saturday, northwest of Malaysia.

Their suspicion has hardened that it was flown off-course by
the pilot or co-pilot, or someone else with detailed knowledge
of how to fly and navigate a large commercial aircraft.

No details have emerged of any passengers or crew with
militant links or psychological problems that could explain a
motive for sabotaging the flight.

The experienced captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was a flying
enthusiast who spent his off days tinkering with a flight
simulator of the plane that he had set up at home, current and
former co-workers said. Malaysia Airlines officials did not
believe he would have sabotaged the flight.

The 27-year-old co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid was religious and
serious about his career, family and friends said, countering
news reports suggesting he was a cockpit Romeo who was reckless
on the job.

TWO ROUTES

As the search enters its second week, several governments
are using imagery satellites - platforms that take high
definition photos - while data from private sector
communications satellites is also being examined.

China alone says it has deployed 10 satellites in the search
in a pointed reminder of its growing influence in space.

"It is like finding a needle in a haystack and the area is
enormous. Finding anything rapidly is going to be very
difficult," said Marc Pircher, director of the French space
centre in Toulouse, run by the country's CNES space agency.

"The area and scale of the task is such that 99 percent of
what you are getting are false alarms".

The corridors given by Najib represent a satellite track,
which appears as an arc on a map. The plane did not necessarily
follow the corridor, but was at some point along its path at the
moment the signal was sent.

Officials at Kazakhstan's state air navigation service were
not available for comment while in Turkmenistan, state aviation
officials referred queries to the Foreign Ministry.

Earlier, a source familiar with official U.S. assessments of
electronic signals sent to geostationary satellites operated by
Britain's Inmarsat (Other OTC: IMASF - news) said it appeared most likely the
plane turned south over the Indian Ocean, where it would
presumably have run out of fuel and crashed into the sea.

If so, just finding the plane - let alone recovering the
"black box" data and cockpit voice recorders that hold the key
to the mystery - would be a huge challenge.

The featureless expanse of the Indian Ocean has an average
depth of more than 12,000 feet, or two miles (3.5 km). That's
deeper than the Atlantic (Frankfurt: 98S.F - news) , where it took two years to locate
wreckage on the seabed from an Air France (Paris: FR0000031122 - news) plane that vanished in
2009 even though floating debris quickly pointed to the crash
site.

Any debris would have been widely dispersed by Indian Ocean
currents in the week since the plane disappeared.

The other interpretation was that the aircraft continued to
fly to the northwest and headed over Indian territory.

The source added that it was believed unlikely the plane
flew for any length of time over India because it has strong air
defence and radar coverage and that should have allowed
authorities there to see the plane and intercept it.

It is extremely rare for a modern passenger aircraft to
disappear once it has reached cruising altitude, as MH370 had.
When that does happen, the debris from a crash is usually found
close to its last known position relatively quickly.

In this case, there has been no trace of the plane, nor any
sign of wreckage.

The maximum range of the Boeing (NYSE: BA - news) 777-200ER is 7,725 nautical
miles or 14,305 km. It is not clear how much fuel the aircraft
was carrying though it would have been enough to reach its
scheduled destination, Beijing, a flight of five hours and 50
minutes, plus some reserve.

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